CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE SONG OF THE DARK-LORDS

Turn in!  Turn in!  The jungle lords come forth
        Cat-footed, blazing-eyed—­the owners of the dark,
What though ye steal the day!  We know the worth
        Of vain tubes spitting at a phantom mark
With only human eyes to guide the fire! 
        Tremble, ye hairless ones, who only see by day,
The night is ours!  Who challenges our ire? 
        Urrumph!  Urrarrgh!  Turn in there!  Way!

Ye come with iron lines and dare to camp
        Where we were lords when Daniel stood a test! 
Where once the tired safaris used to tramp
        On noisy wheels ye loll along at rest! 
Tremble, ye long-range lovers of the day,
        ’Twas we who shook the circus walls of ancient Rome! 
The dark is ours!  Take cover!  Way there!  Way! 
        Urmmph!  Urrarrgh!  Take cover!  Home!

The man who tries to explain away coincidences to men who were the victims of them is likely to need more sympathy than he will get.  The dictionary defines them clumsily as instances of coinciding, apparently accidental, but which suggest a casual connection.

Lions paid us a visit that first night after Schillingschen’s escape—­the first lions we had seen or heard since landing on the north shore of the lake.  We prayed they might get Schillingschen, yet they and he persisted until morning—­they roaring and circling never near enough for the man on guard to get a shot—­he also circling the camp, calling to his ten men, whom we had transferred from the native village to the second tent under guard of Kazimoto and our own men as a precaution.

Our boys slept as if drugged, but not his.  He called to them in a language that even Kazimoto did not understand, and they kept answering at intervals.  Once, when I was listening to locate Schillingschen if I could, the lions came sniffing and snuffing to the back side of the tent.  I tried to stalk them—­a rash, reprehensible, tenderfoot trick.  Luck was with me; they slunk away in the shadows, and I lived to summon Fred and Will.  We tried to save the donkeys, but the lions took three of them at their leisure, and scared the rest so that they broke out of the thorn-bush boma we had made the boys build (as a precaution against leopards, not lions).  Next morning out of forty we recovered twenty-five, and wondered how many of them Schillingschen got.

Remembering how we ourselves had managed, without ammunition or supplies, we did not fool ourselves with the belief that Schillingschen, with his brutal personal magnetism and profound knowledge of natives, would not do better.  The probability was he would stir up the countryside against us.

He had been doing missionary work; it might be the natives of that part were already sufficiently schooled to do murder at his bidding.